Head Case

by Ross Armstrong

We drive past low price trainer stores and a football ground.

  ‘Listen, Tom, I can’t come with you on this trip you’re on. So I’m just going to tell Levine he should find you someone else.’

  ‘What will you say?’

  ‘I’ll say we don’t get on.’

  ‘Why lie?’

  ‘How do you know I’m lying?’

  ‘Because you can’t fool me, you like me.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yep. Also, you’ve already told a lie and I know about it and if I tell them about it, it won’t look good for you. I could make trouble for you, Emre Bartu. And I don’t want to do that.’

  ‘Is that a threat? Are you threatening me now?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s only ‘cos I like you. Pull over.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pull over!’

  I grab the wheel and that forces Emre to slam on the brakes. We both fly forward but our belts do their jobs and we don’t even suffer a minor whiplash, so I don’t know what he’s so angry about.

  ‘Are you crazy!?’ he shouts

  ‘I’m not crazy,’ I mutter as I get out and approach the black car at the side of the road that had drifted into my vision.

  Ever since I heard the words ‘missing girl’ I’ve been looking for a blacked out car. You don’t see many cars with blacked out windows and you certainly don’t see many halfway up the kerb without number plates front or back.

  I stalk around it and Emre follows.

  No broken windows. Tickets all over it. Possibly dumped. Hubcaps missing, which tells me it’s been there long enough for people to start stripping it for parts but not long enough for it to be towed.

  ‘Tom? Can we do this tomorrow? We can check it out then if you’re interested, but I wanna get home to my girlfriend.’

  Most support officers don’t carry batons due to the ‘nonconfrontational’ nature of our work, but we are authorised to do so. I told Levine it would make me feel more comfortable.

  ‘You’ve got a girlfriend? Nice, good for you,’ I say, smashing into the passenger window with my baton.

  ‘Shit! Tom? Don’t do that. Let’s do this when we’re on the clock tomorrow, okay? We’ll do it together. We’ll stick together, I promise, but not now.’

  It takes a few hits to get through. Then I clear off the loose shards and take a look inside.

  It smells chartreuse. It would taste of ink and sound like an E flat. Owing to the blacked out windows it’s dark. But it’s the smell I’m interested in. He joins me, poking his head inside.

  ‘What would you say that smell is, Emre?’

  ‘Er, I don’t know. I can’t smell anything.’

  Chartreuse, refined yellowing pear-like green, a colour named after a French liqueur.

  ‘I can’t see anything either,’ he says, interest growing. But I spy the outline of a patterned glove, that I’d say is part of a set. But the other glove, and the possible matching hat and scarf, are nowhere to be seen. Leaving the single glove there, alone, lying limply on the back seat.

  Girl missing: Blacked out windows.

  It’s like word association. It’s just how my brain works now. That’s not to say I’m right, but if a girl goes missing there are only so many options.

  1. She’s gone of her own free will.

  2. She’s walked into a trap.

  3. She’s been picked up and taken somewhere against her will.

  And if she’s been taken somewhere you’re going to have to do that with a degree of care. You’re going to have to pacify her, or make sure no one sees her struggle, hence the blacked out car.

  Robbery: blood on broken window.

  Arson: check the insurance.

  GBH: check romantic history.

  Missing girl: car with blacked out windows.

  It’s just something I do. ‘Be open to the fact that the simplest answer is sometimes the best one.’ Even the training officer said that. In other words, clichés become clichés for a reason. They’re neither to be worshipped or ignored.

  I should’ve been watching Bartu instead of wandering through these thoughts though, because when I turn to him he’s in the process of doing something uncharacteristically stupid.

  ‘My phone’s got a torch app, but it’s dead. Here,’ he says, flicking his Zippo alight and leaning it into the car just as something tells me that the chartreuse might be something to be concerned about.

  ‘No!’ I shout, grabbing him. He drops the thing and I throw both of us back as the car goes up in flames. We hit the ground, hard.

  The next thing I notice is the white smell of our burnt hair.

  I close my eyes, half expecting the whole thing to go up – boom! But it doesn’t. It’s not quite how you’d want it to be. But it’s still a spectacle the upholstery definitely isn’t going to survive.

  ‘Fuck!’ he shouts. He’d definitely be worse off if he’d leaned further in, and ended up half the man he used to be facially.

  The car blazes beautifully against the night sky, as snow begins to fall. Embers rise, passing white flakes, kissing them hello and goodbye as they rise towards the abyss above.

  ‘Fire Alight’ starts playing on a loop in my head. It’s another lullaby I wrote in the ward; you won’t know it. My subconscious has a dark sense of humour.

  Missing girl. Blacked out car that sets alight. If all this doesn’t pique Emre’s interest, then it damn well should do.

  The chartreuse and blue are linked. I think the scents have shades of each other within them, now I picture them together.

  ‘Fuck,’ he repeats, more from anger than pain.

  I face the flames. I’m resolved. It’s my time to shine.

  I pick him up and dust us both down. Then I pull him back again, as something goes bang!

  We fall down onto our arses. And watch the car shake. Muffled cracks and bangs rumble away in there.

  Bang. Crack. Bang.

  I picture the shadow of a jittery guy in a blacked out car on the day I was shot. This car, I’m guessing. I sniggered as he sped away. I’m not sniggering now.

  Cars don’t explode if you shoot into the petrol tank like in the movies. It wouldn’t happen that way, trust me. Cars don’t tend to do anything that dramatic, unless they happen to be, for instance, filled with fireworks.

  Boom!

  The boot lifts clean off and rolls a few metres away from us. Lights pulsate from the back of the car, then are flung out onto the ground causing three-second long lakes of green and red sparks, as high-pitched whistles join the other noises and we hold our ears.

  But still, it’s the fireworks not the tank that has exploded. Because petrol tanks don’t tend to explode.

  Unless, for example, those fireworks spark an even bigger fire, that heats the petrol in the tank below to combustion point.

  Whoomph! A noise that puts the gunpowder bangs into context. I’m closer than I want to be, as the tank explodes.

  Grey smoke and debris shoot into the night air.

  Then a single rocket escapes and shoots over the London skyline. It’s a hell of a show. You can’t help but just sit, watch and shake your head at the spectacle of it all.

  Fire. Gunpowder. You slam some things together and the world reacts accordingly.

  Me. Bartu.

  Girls and boys.

  Bullets. Brains.

  The smooth neck of the London city sky and everything else, that glints blade-like underneath.

  We watch it in wonder.

  ‘Fuck’ indeed.

  The sky lights up. A millisecond of day in our evening time. Like sheet lightning.

  Documented Telephone Conversation #1

  It rings.

  ‘Hello?’ she says.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello. Who is this?’

  ‘Err…’

  The silence drags.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  ‘Hmm,’ comes the non-committal noise across the line.

  ‘You hid your num
ber,’ she says.

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You know you did,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah…’

  The caller starts to tap their knee nervously. The receiver of the call shifts her seating position, but she doesn’t feel the need to talk. Then she gets up and moves into another room, perhaps so she can speak more freely, it is the evening after all and she may not be alone. She settles down in her new position, wherever that may be. She hasn’t been wherever she currently is for very long. Then she breathes a sigh across the line.

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘How’ve you been?’ she says, not taking the bait.

  ‘I’ve been worse. I’ve been better.’

  ‘Do you need to talk?’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I do, I need to talk. I don’t want to, but I need to.’

  ‘What do you need to talk about?’ she says.

  ‘I just need to talk, and hearing your voice isn’t bad either. Not too bad I suppose.’

  ‘How’s your new job going?’

  ‘It’s going,’ I murmur.

  I know that she senses the tension of it. Anger or the unsaid can so easily sound like flirtation but that’s not what she wants. She doesn’t want any of it. She wants to get on with her life and to not feel bad for wanting that. She feels that as it was me who called, the onus is on me to drive beginnings, otherwise it’s like someone insisting on coming to your house in the afternoon only to lie dormant on your sofa. We both feel the silences take on different forms, which is one of the miracles that everyone has felt since the advent of the telephone call and has been repeated thousands of times all over the world since. It’s a kind of telepathy. We’ve picked up where we left off.

  ‘So what’s happened since we last spoke? Anything big?’

  ‘You could say that,’ I say.

  ‘You sound different,’ Anita says.

  ‘I am,’ I say.

  ‘What happened?’

  Amongst the many fragments of advice that Ryans has given me, talking to someone I knew well before the accident stood out. He would even like to meet with somebody who can attest to certain changes in me. ‘It’s difficult to know where you’re headed if we don’t know where you’ve been’, he says. But there is only really one who knew me before and I don’t want her talking to him about me.

  I should talk because I’m told that it will help. But it stings.

  ‘The fundamental requirements for my work. Do you remember I read them to you?’ I say.

  ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘Inspire confidence with your presence. Don’t jump to conclusions about what you see and hear. Win co-operation through good-humoured persuasion. Display good stamina for working on foot.’

  ‘So… how are you doing?’ Anita says

  ‘Well… my stamina for working on foot is good.’

  ‘Ha.’ She laughs her laugh.

  ‘Don’t laugh.’

  ‘I wasn’t laughing at you. Have you lost your sense of humour?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Can’t find it anywhere. Also, I’ve become impulsive. Also, you’re subtly slurring, which indicates you might soon get a migraine. I read a new study. You should take magnesium tablets.’

  ‘Seriously, none of this sounds at all like you,’ she says.

  ‘So you’ve said. I should tell you, a thing happened. There was an accident, a bad one. It happened to me. Don’t you read the paper?’

  ‘No. What accident?’ she says.

  I breathe. Quick ones. Three in and three out.

  ‘I won’t bother you with it. I needed to talk. Now I have.’

  ‘Are you okay? You seem so different.’

  ‘People change. Goodbye,’ I say.

  ‘No, I want to see you. Please. I’m worried. I still… I do love… ’

  ‘I don’t want to hear that. And no, I won’t want to see you.’

  ‘I’m going to come round. Stay there. I’m coming round now.’

  ‘Please don’t. That might make me very angry. People change. Good luck.’

  10

  ‘Can’t. Dah dah dah dee door, dah dah, dee dah…’

  I see a girl, when I say a girl this time I mean a woman, mid to late twenties. My age. She wears a green dress. There is a song playing. She is walking away from me towards a car near a forest. I follow her. She knows I’m there. She looks behind her to check. When she sees me she doesn’t smile and nor do I. Smoke rises from the forest. But it doesn’t seem to be on fire. It smokes majestically, like a cigarette. She has blonde hair.

  ‘Can’t. Dah dah dah dee door, dah dah, my head…’

  She slides into the car and waits for me there. I lift my pace. I take a look behind me. Around the corner comes a man. He also has blond hair. He has something in his pocket. I turn forward again and speed up but don’t want him to know I’m scared. I don’t want him to know I’m up to something. I get faster, incrementally, but I’m getting no nearer the car she lingers in, her seat pulled back so she can lean into it languorously.

  The car seems further away with every step I take, and I can see she’s waiting, not dreamily now, somehow agitated. She pulls her seat forward and starts the engine. I’m so far away.

  I turn. He’s right behind me. He’s so close. It ends.

  It feels like a dream. And this time, it is one.

  *

  When I wake it’s 2pm, I stayed up most of the night ‘reading’ and thinking. We’re on the night shift this evening. I do a couple of half-shift nights in the week to mix things up. Then I take Saturday off and do only five hours on Sunday.

  I rearranged the spread of my week when I came back as my priorities had changed. I want to work pretty much as many days as possible now to keep up my routine. Bartu wanted a different rota but I said I ‘like my way’, and he’s stuck with me for now, so we left it at that.

  I lock eyes with the cat. He’s probably pretty miffed that I haven’t spent much quality time with him thus far. I’ve fed and watered him well though and we already had a cat flap from a brief stint with a feline named Muffin when I was young, so he can’t deny all the facilities are there.

  ‘You okay, cat?’ I say, solemnly, unsure of my method of approach.

  He gives me a certain kind of fuck you look and takes a seat on my ankle. The naming issue is becoming a significant one for him, I infer, so I set off on a trial run.

  ‘You okay… Dean?’ I say. Nothing.

  ‘You okay… Chris?’ Nonplussed.

  ‘You fine, Mr… Chair,’ I say, having looked around for inspiration.

  ‘You okay, Mark?’ A meow. This confirms a suspicion I had earlier. I knew he was a Mark.

  I thought of the name as soon as I saw him and considered how interesting it could be to try to dictate a story about his life if it were so. ‘Can I ask you a question, Mark? Question-mark.’ One section would go. I wonder whether technology has developed enough for an app to decipher this sentence. I realise it’s an odd thought but I have copious alone time and the mind does wander. An excess of which is exactly what Mark is supposed to combat.

  I stare at him and urge myself to connect. It would be good for me, Ryans had promised.

  ‘Can I ask you a question, Mark?’

  I take his quiet as compliance.

  ‘What sort of person has that many fireworks in the boot of their car?’

  He breathes out and deflates almost entirely. I jettison the possibility of conversation and do my exercises. He watches disapprovingly, silently judging me with his smart arse eyes, waving at me mockingly every so often with his smart arse tail, tasting every bit of himself with his smart arse tongue.

  The buzz of seeing the car go up took a while to fade. To our surprise, when we reported it, what came out was the truth: ‘We saw a car on our way home and thought it seemed suspicious. I was a bit overzealous, Bartu made an error, but no one got hurt.

  ‘He wasn’t to know it was filled with carbon monoxide, or that the boot contained enough fireworks
to mount a decent church display. Anyway, it made for a hell of a back to work celebration, sir,’ I said.

  ‘At first, we thought it was a car bomb, chief,’ said Bartu.

  It wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a trap. All options are open.

  The chief is supposed to be in charge of this place but he seems to me to be a rather nervy and unimpressive man. He was more concerned about me on the whole. How I was ‘feeling’, if I was ‘safe’. We were told to be a lot more careful around cars in the future. We nodded like children, then the chief placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder, which was anything but. Then he went back to his paperwork before I knew that the conversation was over, like an errant stepfather doing just enough to make his lover’s kids feel like he actually cares.

  But that was it. No further reprimand. Workers in Argos break TVs when they come down the chute. Milkmen smash glass bottles. Cats piss on the carpet. PCSOs blow up cars filled with Catherine Wheels. It’s nothing to worry about. Consider our wrists gently slapped. Our one point of contention came when the chief sent us to file a report with the duty officer, who seemed to take umbrage with my claim to have smelt a leak.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ said the duty officer.

  ‘Really?’ I said, concealing the fact that really I saw it rather than smelt it. And that it tasted of ink. And sounded like an E flat.

  ‘It’s odourless. Humans can’t smell it.’

  ‘Oh. Well I can, it seems.’

  ‘It’s odourless,’ he said, perplexed.

  ‘Oh, well. Just lucky I guess.’

  I discovered in my home research that it’s not entirely true that carbon monoxide is undetectable or odourless. Some people have been known to sense it but up to now all of those people have been dogs. I’m not entirely sure how dogs have made that clear, or why my sense of smell is more akin to a dog’s, but there we are.

  In the debrief room myself and Emre Bartu say little. We’re playing a game I think, which is tough for me, I’m better focusing on the literal than anything that involves subterfuge. It makes me seem a touch autistic, I suppose, but that’s not it. People with autism often don’t like the nature of ruses themselves, whereas I’d love to partake in one, I just find it mentally difficult to squeeze out anything but the truth.